V.1.2
THE NORTHERN SCHOOL
All the theories heretofore reviewed have in common the
fact that they attempted to explain the guest and service
structures of the Plan of St. Gall in the light of house types
presumed to have existed in Etruscan, Roman, and Gallo-Roman
times. The most ardent exponent of this school,
Franz Oelmann, expressed himself in no uncertain terms
when he summarized his views with the phrase, "The Plan
of St. Gall, then, must be derived in its entirety from the
Classical tradition, i.e., from Roman architecture, and of
Northern influences . . . there can be no question whatsoever."[35]
The uncompromising fervor of this assertion is
clear evidence that at the time these lines were written, the
issue had already entered a highly controversial phase.
And indeed, as early as the last two decades of the nineteenth
century, the views of the classicists had begun to be
progressively challenged by the speculation of an opposing
school that proposed to reconstruct the guest and service
structures of the Plan of St. Gall in the light of northern
rather than classical building traditions. The seeds of this
theory may actually be discovered in the writings of some
of the exponents of the classical school. When Rahn, in
1876, interpreted the testu[do] squares as symbols for a
lantern-surmounted opening in the roof above the hearth,
he breached the thinking of the classicists, since this was a
solution suggested by analogy with northern rather than
with southern building types. Yet, apart from this "intrusive"
detail, Rahn's reconstruction was essentially a product
of the classical school. A square attack on the theories
of the latter, however, was launched in 1882 by Rudolf
Henning.
RUDOLF HENNING, 1882
In a study entitled "Das Deutsche Haus in seiner historischen
Entwickelung,"[36]
Rudolf Henning stressed the resemblance
of the plan of the St. Gall house to certain
house types still used in Upper Germany and in Switzerland,
in territories once occupied by Frankish, Alamannic,
and Bajuvarian tribes. In dwellings of this type (fig. 275)
such as is exemplified by a house from the Engadin in
Switzerland, the hearth is, as a rule, located in a common
center room (Eren) from which access is gained to all the
subsidiary outer rooms. It is surmounted by a wooden
smoke flue of pyramidal shape which projects beyond the
roof like a chimney and can be closed and opened by an
adjustable lid. A similar arrangement is found even today
in old farmhouses of Denmark (fig. 276). Henning did not
propose that the St. Gall house was equipped with such a
smoke flue. He believed, on the contrary, that it had an
open hearth and, in the roof above the hearth, a lantern-surmounted
opening that served as a smoke outlet and as a
light source. He imagined the St. Gall house to have been a
spacious, steep-roofed structure with inner wall partitions
that did not obstruct the view of its enclosing walls and
rafters. He felt supported in this assumption by a passage
in the Lex Alamannorum which makes the paternal right
of inheritance dependent on the ability of the newborn
child to encompass the roof and the four corners of the
house as he opens his eyes.[37]
The existence of a house of
this description, Henning felt, must be postulated as the
medieval prototype form of the modern Swiss and Upper
German farmhouses with central hearth and central accessibility
of the subsidiary outer rooms; and, in the houses of
the Plan of St. Gall, he believed to have discovered the
first pictorial evidence of this prototype form. The development
that leads from this archetype to its modern derivative,
Henning assumed, was characterized by the gradual
substitution of a stone-built stove with smoke flue for the
originally open fireplace, and by the removal of the light
source from the ridge of the roof to the walls, which became
necessary when the opening in the ridge was obstructed by
the installation of a central smoke stack.
The beginnings of this displacement of the open fireplace
by stone-built stoves, Henning suggested, may already be
observed in some of the more distinguished structures of
the Plan of St. Gall, such as the House for Distinguished
Guests, where the common central fireplace is already
supplemented by stone-built corner fireplaces.
KARL GUSTAV STEPHANI, 1902-1903, AND
CHRISTIAN RANCK, 1907
Henning refrained from embodying his ideas about the
St. Gall house in a visual form, and in the fifty years that
followed, this theory found neither support nor acceptance.
The views expressed in Karl Gustav Stephani's encyclopedic
work on the early German dwelling and its furnishings,[38]
as well as those in Christian Ranck's percursory but
widely read cultural history of the German farmhouse,[39]
are literal repetitions of Julius von Schlosser and show that
the work of even those who specialized in the history of the
German house was still entirely under the spell of the
thinking of the classicist. But in the third decade of this
century, the method that Henning had initiated, namely,
that of attempting to reconstruct the St. Gall house in the
light of its modern derivatives rather than of its historical
prototypes, found a sudden revival in a number of visual
reconstructions that marked a complete departure from
the thinking of the classical school. These reconstructions
(figs. 277-281) came from the hands of men who were not
primarily historians but professional architects, and they
were the product of intuitive speculation rather than of
documentative historical study. The first of these was made
by H. Fiechter-Zollikofer in 1936.
H. FIECHTER-ZOLLIKOFER, 1936
Mr. Fiechter-Zollikofer, a Swiss engineer, wrote an article
entitled "Etwas vom St. Galler Klosterplan aus der Zeit
um 820," which was published in the Schweizerische Technische
Zeitschrift,[40]
a journal not normally read by the
architectural historian of the Middle Ages. In this article
Fiechter-Zollikofer reproduced not only an over-all reconstruction
of the entire monastery shown on the Plan of St.
Gall, in bird's-eye view (fig. 277), but also a separate reconstruction
of the exterior of the Outer School (fig. 278), the
exterior of the Abbot's House (fig. 254), as well as a number
of perspectives and cuts of the church and the claustral
structures.
Fiechter-Zollikofer was convinced that the traditional
concept of the St. Gall house as a dwelling that received
its light in the Italian manner through windows in its
clerestory walls was incompatible with the climatical conditions
prevailing in transalpine Europe, and that a solution
infinitely better adapted to the rain and snowswept foothills
of the Alps could be found if the St. Gall house were
reconstructed in the light of certain rural timber dwellings
still used in many districts of Switzerland.
Accordingly, he reconstructs the St. Gall house as a
low-roofed, low-walled gable house of logs with corner-timbered
protruding beams (fig. 278). The center room
of this house receives its light through a large tapering
shaft mounted upon the ridge of the roof which could be
opened and closed through an adjustable lid (fig. 279); the
outer rooms were lighted through windows in the peripheral
log walls. Fiechter-Zollikofer's reconstruction is the first
attempt to interpret the guest and service structures of
the Plan of St. Gall in the light of an actually existing
vernacular house type. It is a handsome reconstruction,
but the prototype after which it is modeled, the Alpine
log house, is too closely associated with local conditions to
have been adopted in a master plan that was drawn up for
the whole of the Frankish empire. Log construction depends
on abundant stands of fir trees, such as are available in the
Alps, the Black Forest, and the mountain ranges of Scandinavia;
but in the lowlands this material was lacking.
Moreover, Fiechter-Zollikofer did not enter into any
detailed analysis of the internal layout of these houses. He
did not support his reconstructions with any specific parallels
with comparable structures still in existence, or attempt
to trace this house type to its historical past.
OTTO VÖLCKERS, 1937
Fiechter-Zollikofer's article had barely been published when
the German architect, Otto Völckers, touched upon the
problem of the St. Gall house in a small, handsomely
illustrated book in which he reviewed the history of the
European house from the Stone Age to the present.[41]
Völckers exemplified his views with a reconstruction of
St. Gall's House for Distinguished Guests (fig. 280). This
he imagines to have been a steep-roofed structure, hipped-over
on the narrow ends of the building. The walls are low
and masonry-built with windows giving light to the external
rooms. The center room is lighted by an opening in the
ridge above the hearth site, which also serves as a smoke
outlet and is surmounted by a small protective roof that
shields the opening against any downpour. The heating
units in the bedrooms of the distinguished guests are
interpreted as corner fireplaces with masonry stacks protruding
through the roof above them. Völckers did not discuss
the structure in any further detail, but judging from an
interior view of the dining room (fig. 281) which he published
in a subsequent book,
[42]
he appears to think of the
inner wall partitions as likewise being built as solid masonry
walls.
KARL GRUBER, 1937
The same year that Völckers published his pictorial review
of the history of the German house, and probably independent
of both Völckers' and Fiechter-Zollikofer's proposal,
Karl Gruber published still another reconstruction of the
Plan, in bird's-eye view, in a superbly illustrated book,
entitled Die Gestalt der deutschen Stadt (fig. 282).[43]
Like
Fiechter-Zollikofer, Gruber reconstructs the St. Gall house
as a house with low pitched roof and straight gable walls on
the narrow sides. It receives its light from windows in the
supporting walls and emits the smoke of its hearth through
a louver in the ridge of the roof. The latter, as in Völckers'
reconstruction, is rendered as a miniature roof, raised above
the level of the main roof to protect the opening over the
hearth site. Gruber is not specific about the material used
in the construction of his houses. The uniform mode of the
rendering of the walls suggests that he thought of them as
being built in masonry.
